Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog

Breaking News: PubCon officially has the worst lunch of all major search conferences. Congrats, guys!

Okay, back from lunch. SEO bad boy Todd Friesen will moderate this one with speakers Jessica Berlin, Andy Beal and Lee Odden. Andy Beal? What does Andy know about reputation monitoring. Kidding! We love you, Andy.

Lee Odden is up first.

Why is Online Reputatement Management important?

Because your customers are online. Your prospects are online. Competitors are online. People pissed at you for no reason are online. The Lisa is online.

How Important is it to know about dissatisfied customers, brand de-evangelists and brand champions?

Your online reputation is influenced by search, social media, and mainstream media. Do you even know what your top search rankings are for? Do you know who the most influential people are in the social media channels?

Google is not just a search engine. It’s a reputation engine. At PR conferences, they view brand name rankings as valuable hits in mainstream media.

Type in [paypal] and you have paypalsucks.com. Walmart has three negative results on the first page. Target got themself into a mess when they told a blogger to go away.

Tools for Reputation Monitoring:

Free: Google Alerts, TweetBeep (who tweeted about your brand name)

Small Biz: Trackur

Enterprise: BuzzLogic, Radian6

Short Term Reputation Management: Make brand optimization a process. Brand optimize all digital assets, like text images, audio and video. Optimize across departments. Result is a more branded SERPs.

Long Term: Identify, qualifying and engaging dissenters. Is there merit to the issue? If not, offer facts and ask for correction. If yes, offer to discuss. Result can be loyal brand fans.

Be careful out there: What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas…until someone writes about it on Twitter.

Up next is Andy Beal.

There are so many different components to reputation management. The one area everyone can work on right now is monitoring your reputation. Even if you’re not ready to respond, you should at least know what’s being said about you.

The very pretty Jessica Berlin is up next. She works for Cirque du Soleil.

Her customers are talking a lot about their experiences. The experience begins when they purchase their tickets and ends when they leave the show.

They’re looking at people who are writing about their experiences. They want to know what they liked and didn’t like. They want to brand each show individually. They want to know who their evangelists are. What else do their fans want to keep them connected to the brand?

They just launched Criss Angel Believe. She’s noticed how things have changed in the past two years. They employed DEI Worldwide to generate buzz about the show, to spread info, etc. When “bad” reviews came out, they helped them address the concerns and assure fans that they were listening and working on things.

Shifting PR Practices:

Bloggers given the same access as mainstream media

Social Media Releases

A two-way conversation = Trust

Newsworthy things are happening daily

Easing of PR Guidelines

Brings us closer to the journalist

Trust in Employees

Encouraging conversations: They give journalists, bloggers and consumers tools that they can all use. They have branded channels on the social networks. There are also quizzes and widgets to get people excited.

Question and Answer

Can you talk more about sentiment analysis? What is it? Who are the vendors?

Lee: It’s good or bad. They look at the words near your brand.

Andy: There are companies who do it for 5-10K a month. It’s hard to do it right because there are so many false positives. There’s no technology out there that can do it better than a human. Trackur shows you the influence and then you can mark it yourself.

Jessica: She uses BuzzLogic but you have to enter the sentiment manually.

With regard to social media, what is the role of the talent as far as content creation?

Right now the publicists are the main content producers. They know the ins and outs. They’re creating the video and blog posts. They plan on instituting an internal film competition next year open to all staff. People can submit it and they’ll have the content to use on all their channels.

There’s no shortage of sources on the ‘net for what people are saying, but how do you sift through to find the more urgent stuff?

Lee: Look for software that can associate influence with a particular source (how many comments, number of links, etc).

Andy: You need to look at benchmarks — where are you now? What’s being said about you now? Then figure out what your objectives are. Reputation management is one big cocktail party. You’re going to be drawn to the people who are interested in the topics you’re interested in and then make yourself part of that conversation. You’re not going to try and gauge everybody.

How do you get things like RipOff report out of the SERPs?

Andy: Open your wallet. They “allegedly” optimize the listings. They “allegedly” allow people to share their side of the story. I advise companies not to respond. You just have to keep them out of Google.

Todd: All we would do is push it off.

Audience Member:To get a listing off RipOff report, you pay them 15K and they’ll ask you to rewrite it the way you want it.

[Someone else (I think it was Bill Atchison) shared a sneaky way of geting off RipOff report but asked us not to blog it. I’m going to respect the community here and keep quiet.]

Other tools to monitor image sites?

Andy: There are others besides Flickr, but they don’t have the coverage.

Good writeup on the session. What the pannelists said is sort of regurgetated. What of the “sneaky” ways you sort of hint upon via Twitter?

For us Review Stream has gotten a pretty good foothold, but I’ve managed to keep them off page 1 for our branded terms for the most part, but occasionally they resurface. At this point, Ripoff Report is a non-issue for us. My3Cents kindly removed posts I found to be spam.

I’m surprised no one mentioned Monitter.com, which allows you to monitor any keyword phrase as it is mentioned live on Twitter. It’s an essential tool for companies looking to respond to customer complaints or gripes within moments. That is advanced reputation management, and something few companies have the vision for (Zappos is one company that does).